Once upon a long ways away there was a man, a human, and he was very desperate.
He stood in the woods with a bowstring drawn and a head full of desperation and he whispered to himself the most sincere of prayers – and he’d been a pious man all his life. This was what he prayed:
“Oh god,” he mumbled, “oh god, oh god. Please oh god, just one bit of game. Just one. Just one small and starved little animal. I’ll take a half-dead deer; I’ll take a withered rabbit; I’d even swallow a fat mouse or two without complaint. I beseech thee please oh god, please don’t let me starve.”
And his god heard him and looked down upon him and saw all his long life of passionate devotion and weighed his soul in their palm and saw that his decrees were just.
“Let it be so!” they commanded.
Interestingly enough, the man was not the only voice of piety in the woods that day. A full choir of tens of thousands surrounded him, singing a song without words, rising a great ruckus to the heavens and hells around them, chanting a primal plea so old and so strong that it etched the air.
They were bats, they were bees, they were birds and mice and fleas, they were deer, they were hare, they were just about everything but the skunk nearby and this was what they prayed:
“Oh fuck,” they wished, deeply and passionately. Oh fuck fuck fuck. Please fucking fuck don’t let something grab me and eat me sweet shit on a stone. Let me make it through one more day without being something’s lunch. It’s almost spring and one more year of hot and messy reproductive activity is all that I could ask for oh fuck fuck fuck don’t let me get caught.”
And their god, the god of all the small and horrified things that have ever scurried for cover and found it wanting, glanced side to side in a nervous fit and saw their bugged eyes and horrified tension, and it nodded and knew their pleas were righteous.
LET IT BE SO, it decreed.
Anyways that god’s decree ran head first into the other god’s command and caused a large and aggressive tornado which not only prevented the man’s getting much hunting done but also stripped half the foliage out of the forest and used it to knock down the man’s house. He starved to death three days later, a little annoyed by the ineffable.
***
Once upon somewhere else there was a woman and she was stone-cold desperate.
A field, a full field, and its neighbour, and its neighbour. All her hope and riches and life were bound up inside its golden stalks, and they were turning browner and dustier.
The sky was a dead blue, cold empty. The sun was a hot white blot.
“Gods above and below,” whispered the woman, “I’m not extremely pious – although my husband is, so have a word in for him if nothing else – but I ask you this from the bottom of my liver and the soles of my feet on up: please give me rain. A cloudlet, a shower, a sprinkle, a spittle, whatever it is, I don’t care, I will take it and love it. Just a speck of rain.”
Her prayer wandered out into the hot dead air and buffeted its way into the manses of the gods and they were pleased by it and held it up into the air and whistled until it spun and tore and wove itself into a fat grey cloud, furiously pregnant with rain.
“That is done,” they said.
However, the fields were not as empty of life as they appeared. Down in the dirt, spinning in the grave of the crops, a thousand thousand thousand seeds struggled and hummed and rose in the dirt. Heat-resistant, water-tolerant, pest-poisoning, rapid-growing, they hungered under the soil and knew their moment had almost come. And so came the thought that grew and grew until it was bigger than the field and the houses and the sky and the world itself.
“Almost there! Just a bit farther! One more day like this and I’m golden! Almost there! I can do it! I can do it! Please I can do it! Just a bit farther! Please! Please! PLEASE!”
It throbbed through the soil of the world and it hummed into the roots of that which does that sort of growing, and it was very impressed by their ferventness and buzzed a little something back to them and the sky cleared up like a bell.
The sun shone, the crops bleached, the town shrivelled. But the weeds came out in DROVES that year.
***
The loneliest person in the world stood atop the deck of their ship, lashed to the mast, hands on the rudder, screaming in a vague sort of way to themselves as the rain tried to punch them through the deck. The scream had no words, but the thoughts in their mind were bright and lucid and as clear as the sky wasn’t.
“FIVE. MORE. MILES. I CAN MAKE FIVE. MORE. MILES. LET IT END. LET IT END. IF ONLY FOR A MINUTE LET IT END, SO I CAN TAKE A BREATH AND A BITE AND TIE THIS THING BACK TOGETHER. LET IT END FOR JUST A SECOND. A SECOND. A SECOND.”
It was a non-denominational sort of prayer so it went to a non-denominational sort of force, which was currently piloting the hurricane through the ocean.
“Hmm,” it said, and was very impressed by the earnestness of the sailor’s thoughts, which were very forceful and eloquent.
Then it looked over at the islands it was bearing down upon, whose thoughts were one word and that was “WATER.”
“Sorry pal,” it said. “You’re outvoted.” And it drove its storm right down over everything.
***
It was the greatest city in the world and it was about to fall over.
The ground was trying to rise into the sky. The river was hurling itself in circles. The houses were shuffling their feet like embarrassed children and the animals had all fled screaming hours ago.
And in the minds and hopes and dreams and thoughts of every person there was just one simple prayer:
“OH GOD NO OH SHIT”
which is the oldest prayer, and so garnered much attention from god, who stooped low over the city and reached out into the ground and encountered the slow-moving and truculent god of the tectonic plate, who told god “no dice. Ain’t happening. I’m busy and this is a long time coming. Clear out.”
So the city fell down anyways, but oh well.
***
The sky was turning white. The atmosphere was rubbing itself raw and hot on the hull of the asteroid. A little leftover bit of a little leftover debris from a little leftover star, come all this way to say hello to everyone and everything all at once.
And from below, where the news had been a thing for some time, ten billion prayers rose to meet it.
“Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit PLEASE don’t let this HAPPEN to ME.”
And from below, where everything else had just noticed this.
“Oh no! Not that! Please not that!”
And from all around them everything listened, gods of root and stem and heart and cell and crag and magma and air and Van Allen belts and they walked up into the air around the asteroid and asked it to stop.
“Let me think about this,” asked the asteroid.
So it prayed too.
The god of extremely large and empty spaces noticed it eventually. It took a few million instants.
“No,” it said. “This is happening.”
“Alright,” said everyone. “Fair enough.”
And bonk, there you go, there everyone went.